UPPER BRACKET.

$1.8 million will buy 1870 inn and acreage on the Fox River

January 27, 2002|By Bob Goldsborough. Special to the Tribune.

A 12,000-square-foot, four-story stone inn on 38 acres in far southwest suburban Plano has been listed for $1.8 million.

"Millhurst Inn," which dates to 1870 and previously was a limestone mill, resort, speakeasy and nursing home, most recently has been an inn with six rooms, said listing agent Dan Jungclas of GMAC Real Estate in Naperville. Now, owners Ken and Arlene Koehler have listed the inn and its surrounding property, at 15426 Millhurst Road.

"The owners bought it as a distressed, burned-out property, and went in and totally renovated it [in 1996]," Jungclas said. "It's done in what is kind of a Mediterranean style."

The inn, which is 50 miles southwest of Chicago, sits on the Fox River less than a mile from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's modernist Farnsworth House, a steel-and-glass riverfront landmark on 61 acres that state officials are attempting to buy for $7 million from its private owner.

Millhurst's 16-room main structure has a three-story atrium with a custom staircase, cherry, walnut and hackberry moldings and woodwork, tile and hackberry wood floors, 20-foot ceilings, a conference room, library with a balcony, gazebo, guest cottage and workshop, according to listing information. The inn also has a kitchen with three cooktops, a fireplace, limestone-walled master bedroom with private balcony, and seven bedroom suites with river views and quarry-tiled, private baths with whirlpool tubs.

- Qatar's emir has withdrawn a $27 million bid for a 20,646-square-foot, four-story mansion in Manhattan, according to the New York Observer. Although Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani has drawn criticism for allowing his nation's television network, Al-Jazeera, to serve as a mouthpiece for terrorist Osama bin Laden, the emir gave no reason for his rescinded bid for the mansion at 2 E. 63rd St., which the New York Academy of Sciences presently owns, the paper reported.

An academy official told the paper that the emir had wanted to convert the 75-foot-wide, Italian Renaissance-style mansion back into a single-family home. Built in 1919, the mansion was donated to the academy in 1949.

While some speculated that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have jeopardized the bid, another real estate source told the paper that the emir also has been looking at a French school's 25,363-square-foot, Beaux-Arts mansion that is listed for $25 million.

- Speaking of foreign owners withdrawing high-priced New York City bids, Cem Uzan, a Turkish telecommunications mogul, has forfeited an approximately $10 million deposit on his $38 million penthouse in the new Trump World Tower in New York in order to avoid having it seized by U.S. creditors, according to the New York Post. Uzan was to have bought the 17,000-square-foot duplex unit on the 89th and 90th floors, which is just one floor above Bill Gates' 8,500-square-foot unit. Uzan's purchase would have been the most expensive residential purchase ever in New York, according to the Post.

- Tennis star Pete Sampras has paid around $8.5 million for a five-bedroom, more than 8,000-square-foot house in Beverly Hills, according to the Los Angeles Times. The house, built in the 1930s, naturally has a tennis court, as well as a swimming pool and seven bathrooms. Sampras' present house, which he bought in 1998 for close to its $2.9 million asking price, is on 1.5 acres in L.A.'s Benedict Canyon area, the paper reported. Sampras also owns a house in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., which he bought for $785,000 in 2000, according to public records ... A five-bedroom, 5,200-square-foot duplex condominium in New York City's Central Park West that had been bid on by actor Harrison Ford is on the market for $16.4 million, according to the New York Post. The seller, Goldman Sachs executive Bradford Weston, paid $9.5 million for the unit at 15 W. 63rd St. in February 2000, according to the paper. Ford, who also owns a large ranch in Wyoming, a mansion in Connecticut and a $3.5 million apartment in New York City, reportedly has been looking since last summer for rentals throughout Manhattan, the paper reported.

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